


Getting To Know You

by Setcheti



Series: Clint Barton: Witch Hunter [3]
Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Explicit Language, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-28
Updated: 2014-11-28
Packaged: 2018-02-27 06:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2683433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and Clint show up at the Tower to talk to Tony. And later on, so does someone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting To Know You

**Author's Note:**

> NaNoWriMo ended up being pretty much a bust this year thanks to moving, so I decided to finish this story instead - the Rom.com fanfic I was doing for NaNo will get finished later.

One minor re-enactment of a bad spy movie later – i.e., the day after Tony had asked Jarvis to secretly get in touch with Steve Rogers and Clint Barton and invite them to come see him at the Tower – both men were in the Tower’s lobby and Tony was watching on the security monitors as Rogers turn his poster-boy charm on the receptionist while Barton used her distraction to surreptitiously but thoroughly case the place, looking for probably anything and everything and hopefully not finding any of it. Tony waited until they were in the elevator and heading up to the penthouse before calling someone and telling them to let the receptionist go take her break early, because it didn’t look to him like she was going to be any good for anything for a while except maybe a quickie. And Stark Tower wasn’t that kind of building.

Tony was pacing by the time the elevator made it to the penthouse, and he had already stopped himself from getting a drink twice because, honestly, this conversation was going to be weird enough to start sober. “Jarvis, anyone listening?” he asked just before the doors opened.

“No listening devices are present save my own, sir.”

“Good, great, wonderful. I would have hated to have had to start this visit by going over the two of them looking for bugs. Pepper would make me watch that sexual harassment video again.” He waved expansively at the two cautious men getting out of the elevator. “Come on in, boys, see what the place looks like with windows and no demigod-shaped hole in the floor.”

They both looked, and Barton grinned. “Should have drawn a chalk outline around it and written ‘Bruce Was Here’ in the center.”

Tony grinned back. “He’d kill me. I’ll do it for his birthday.”

For some reason, Rogers looked happy about that. “He stayed?”

“He’s downstairs, in the lab I think he took over while everyone else was cleaning up after the alien menace. Jarvis says he’s there, anyway. We can go look later.” He waved again. “Come on in, have a seat. Want a drink?”

“If you’re having one, sure. Scotch?” Tony couldn’t help it, his eyebrows almost climbed right up off his forehead. Rogers chuckled. “Not like I can get drunk.”

Tony recovered himself. “Point. Barton?”

“Scotch works for me.” The archer dropped onto one of the couches the formerly bare space now held. “Black Label, if you’ve got more than one.”

“Swing is better.”

Barton snorted. “Swing is practically bourbon, you Brooklyn heathen.”

Rogers swatted at him before settling himself on the other end of the couch. “Says the man who drinks that piss-water in a can they call beer now.” Tony choked, and this time the look he got was one of concern. “Sorry, want me to tone it down?”

Barton grinned when Tony hesitantly shook his head. “Got him confused with the character he played for the USO, didn’t ya? A lot of people make that mistake.”

 _Because he lets them_ , Tony thought, but didn’t say it out loud. “Whatever pays the bills,” is what he let out instead. “I’m a Gold Label man myself.” He carried three glasses over to the couch on a little tray which he put down on the glass coffee table before taking his own glass to go perch on a nearby chair. “So.”

Rogers raised a sandy blonde eyebrow, taking his drink off the tray and rolling the glass between his palms. “I doubt you actually want to talk about uniforms.”

“You doubt right.” Tony made a face and decided to get the most awkward part of the upcoming conversation over first. “You call England yet?” A blush and a headshake, and he nodded. “Actually, that’s…that’s really good, that you haven’t.” Blue eyes looked into his with a question in them, and he nodded again. “She was always Aunt Peggy to me, even though I didn’t get to see her very often. Which is why I made it a point to be at her funeral when she died six years ago.”

For a moment, just a moment, the physically younger man’s face reflected exactly how much he’d really hoped and feared she’d still been alive, and then his jaw set and the anger of someone who knows they’ve been really, unforgivably played settled in. “She had…a good life?”

“Yeah, from what I could tell.” Tony shrugged. “Like I said, I didn’t get to see much of her. But she didn’t seem unhappy when I did see her, if that helps any.”

“It does.” He took a deep breath, blew it out, and then knocked back half his drink. “Got a phone handy? One that can call England?”

“You’re still going to…”

“Of course.” A tight, hard smile. “They went to all that trouble to set things up, I really should hear what they wanted me to hear, right? And this way you guys can hear it too.”

“Probably an even better idea,” Barton agreed, nodding. “Except whoever it is will know you’re here – Caller ID is a thing now, it’s a display that tells you whose house a call is coming from.”

“Jarvis can get around that,” Tony told them. “Jarvis?”

“Of course, sir,” the disembodied British voice of the AI said placidly. “Should the call register as coming from your apartment, Captain Rogers?”

Rogers nodded slowly. “That would probably be best, yes. You can do that?”

“Quite easily, Captain. Shall I put the call on speaker?”

“No, they’d be able to tell. He can make the call from the little office, that should have about the same acoustics as his apartment. Just play the call out here for Barton and I—and be sure you record it,” Tony instructed. He cocked an eyebrow at Rogers. “You really want to call now?”

“I really don’t _want_ to call at all,” Rogers admitted. “But I’d rather cut the wire under controlled conditions than trip over it later when I’m not expecting it.”

Barton, however, was shaking his head. “No, I don’t think you should call now, not from here. Because they’re bound to know you aren’t in your apartment, and that you’re here, so somebody is likely to get suspicious if you make an international phone call from the apartment _while_ you’re here.”

“Point.” The supersoldier sighed. “Is there a way I can call from the apartment and record it? Without the cameras and bugs picking up that I recorded it?”

Tony very slowly put down his drink. “The what?”

Rogers, surprisingly, rolled his eyes. “Of course the apartment’s bugged. Did you really think they’d just let me go live on my own, do whatever I want? They watch every move I make. I even sit down to piss when I’m at home because there’s a camera in the bathroom and I really don’t feel like shaking it for SHIELD multiple times a day.”

“Jesus.” Tony could think of multiple reasons SHIELD might be watching Rogers that closely, none of them good; he had a feeling Rogers knew that too, though, so he let it go for the time being. “Okay, yeah, I can whip up something for you to use that won’t tip them off – although I, personally, would shake it at their toilet-cam every chance I got just on general principles.”

“I’ve considered it, but I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up,” Rogers replied, completely deadpan…and then he winked. “I am ‘optimal’, you know.”

Barton almost snorted Scotch out his nose; if Tony had been drinking his, he would have for sure. He smiled, though, realizing something: He was realizing why his father had missed this guy so much. That thought, however, was also something that could wait in the face of more pressing concerns. “You,” he scolded, shaking his finger at Rogers, “are just bad. I like you like this, though. Okay though, since we’re on a schedule, next issue. Loki? I hate to bring it up, Barton, but he was in your head and…well, Jarvis thought the conversation you two had that night in here was important, so he recorded it and flagged it for me. I did some digging. You’re…Christ, you’re really _him_ , aren’t you? And Loki knows it now…” 

Clint choked. At first Tony thought he was upset, but then he realized the man was trying not to laugh. He quirked a wry half-smile. “I know you must hate the bastard…”

“Yeah, but it’s not that.” Steve looked like he was trying not to smile too. “Loki doesn’t remember anything about Clint; he didn’t even recognize him the next morning. So no blackmail, no information he shouldn’t have, nothing.” He shrugged. “Good thinking, though.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Good but wrong, obviously. Why didn’t he remember?”

“Because my sister spent half the night torturing him, and somewhere in there she took it all away.” Clint got control of his amusement. “She wasn’t too happy with him.”

“Your sister is…”

“Dead.” Clint shrugged. “But she’s my big sister and we’re both witches, so she kind of stuck around to look after me…after.” Tony’s mouth opened, but then closed again when Steve shook his head quickly. “She can get into someone’s head if she wants to, she’s done it to Steve once or twice.”

Tony looked alarmed, and Steve shook his head again. “No, not like that. She was just passing along information – Gretel wouldn’t hurt me.”

“She wouldn’t,” Clint confirmed. “She likes him.”

Tony nodded slowly. “So the reason Loki spent all of that night having nightmares…was because your sister, Gretel, was torturing him?” Clint grinned wickedly, and Tony sat back with a sigh. “Okay, that answers more than a few questions. Jarvis flagged another file from that night for my attention, footage of Loki having nightmares and trying not to go back to sleep. So now I know what was going on there. What about the sugar?”

Clint winced, and Steve patted his shoulder. “It’s sort of like he has diabetes in reverse.”

“The fairy tale got at least part of the story right,” Clint explained. “A witch caught my sister and me when we were kids. She locked me in a cage and force-fed me enchanted candy, tryin’ to fatten me up so she could eat me. We got away, but because the candy was enchanted…well, it screwed me up. I have to use sugar almost the same way a diabetic uses insulin, I’ll get sick and pass out if I don’t get my dose on time, I could even die.” He sighed. “At least I’m down from havin’ to inject myself every four hours to just takin’ a pill once a day. I add the magic to the pills after they fill my prescription.”

Tony was horrified. “So it’s not just the sugar…”

“It has to be enchanted sugar, yeah. Which sucks. Especially after almost six hundred years.”

Tony mouthed the words ‘six hundred years’, then put his glass down. “You have your pills with you?”

“I don’t go anywhere without ‘em – would you?”

“No, no I wouldn’t. Jarvis, where’s Bruce right now?”

“Dr. Banner is in his lab, sir.”

“ _His_ lab, right. Which one did he claim?”

“74-B1, sir.”

Tony huffed. “Oh no, not acceptable – that’s a shitty little auxiliary lab,” he explained to Steve and Clint. “He needs a better one than that. First, though, we are taking Barton and his pills down there to see if Brucie can do a better job than SHIELD – which I’m sure he can, because he’s a bioengineering genius and I’m about to give him access to practically unlimited funding.” He stood up. “Come on, boys, let’s go visit the man and give him a problem to solve. And after that we’ll whip up something to do with uniforms to give a little truth to the lie, just in case.”

The other two men drained the rest of their drinks, got up and followed him back to the elevator, which took them down to the Tower’s 74th floor and the lab Bruce Banner had claimed as his own. The scientist was surprised and cautiously happy to see them, but once Tony had given him a brief description of the problem he all but pounced on Clint, so Steve and Tony had left the archer there and gone down to Tony’s workshop so they could make up something about uniforms for SHIELD’s benefit – and come up with something that would let Jarvis listen in undetected when Steve finally made his wire-tripping call to England.

 

Late that night, hours after Steve and Clint had left the Tower and an indeterminate amount of time after Tony himself finally went to bed, the billionaire abruptly found himself not asleep and not in his bed, facing a woman who he had to assume was Clint/Hansel’s protective big sister, Gretel. She was a very pretty woman with long dark hair coiled into a braided coronet around her head and a strong-willed set to her jaw, and she raised an eyebrow at him when he looked her over warily. “I look like our father, Hansel looks like our mother.”

“I was about to tactlessly comment on the lack of family resemblance, yeah.” Tony didn’t relax, though. “So this is what you do to Steve…and what you did to Loki, too?”

She sniffed contemptuously. “Loki shouldn’t have hurt my brother. The Asgardians used to know better, but they thought humans didn’t have this kind of power anymore. I would never hurt Steve, though – everyone else has hurt him enough, he doesn’t need any more. And I won’t hurt you unless you try to hurt my brother or Steve – intentionally, that is.”

“Thanks for that out,” Tony told her, honestly relieved. “I don’t always _mean_ to do it.”

“I know.” She sat down, a carved wooden chair with a cushion on it appearing for her, and Tony found one behind him as well, which he sat down on gingerly. “You did your best to help them both earlier today, I liked that. And you had questions you didn’t ask my brother because you didn’t want to upset him – I liked that, too. So here I am, what did you want to know?”

Tony consulted his mental list, reordering it for tact – he didn’t want to upset her, either. “Witches? Any of the really bad ones left?”

Gretel shook her head. “Not that I know of, we wiped most of them out. There may still be a few hiding here or there, but Hansel is good at spotting them so if you run across one, he’ll take care of it. They shouldn’t come after you if you’re not with him, you’re too old.” Tony huffed, and she laughed, shaking her head. “No, Hansel even looks too old for them now. Witches – bad ones, anyway – are, as you would put it, cougars. Steve’s the one you’ll have to watch, some horny old witch would _love_ to get her hands on him.”

Tony choked. “Jesus, that was a thought I did not need – wicked witches wanting to get in Captain America’s pants. Not that half the women in New York don’t want to do the same thing, but still…wrinkly old wicked witches, ugh.”

“With their illusions up, they all mostly look young and beautiful,” Gretel told him. “They can’t hide all of the corruption, though – if you look for it, inside their mouths or under their smallclothes, you can’t mistake it for anything else.” His horrified look made her laugh again. “Yes, you’d either have to get close enough to kiss one or be actively undressing her to tell. Witches were actually behind a lot of the female prudery that was enforced throughout history – if you’re not allowed to see it, you’ll never know it’s there.”

“Good point. Thank god for the sexual revolution, then, I guess – that kind of modesty is the exception not the rule these days.” Tony cocked his head. “Anything you can tell me about your brother’s…condition that I could pass along to Bruce? Whose mind is still just blown by the idea of magic being real, by the way.”

She shrugged. “What Hansel already told him is pretty much all we ever knew. Enchanted candy is addictive, all it takes is a few bites to induce a lingering craving, a handful or two for physical dependence to set in. The witch had us for weeks, and she didn’t give him anything else to eat but candy – which he’s hated ever since, by the way, so if you see him eating it that means he’s feeling sick. He likes dark chocolate, though, it’s not sweet enough to trigger him.”

“My girlfriend likes the dark stuff too, I’ll have to introduce them.” An odd look crossed her face. “I can vouch for Pepper – believe me, we’ve been together for years, I’d have seen it if anything wasn’t right.”

Gretel shook her head again. “No, she’s not a witch…but she may be descended from one. If she has an overly-strong reaction to Hansel when they meet for the first time, though, that will be why. Witches recognize other witches.”

“Are you saying she could…”

“No, she doesn’t have enough of the bloodline in her to go all the way over, not unless she was deliberately working towards it.” Surprisingly, she winked at him. “So if she suddenly calls out Steve’s name while she’s…with you, that’s not about her being a witch.”

Tony snorted. “After seeing him take off his shirt in my workshop earlier today, I wouldn’t even be surprised if _I_ started calling out his name. I understand our formerly deceased agent’s borderline creepy obsession with the guy so much better now…” Another look, this one much, much worse than the one mentioning Pepper had gotten him. “What?”

“Your agent, my brother’s handler…he’s not dead?”

Tony shrugged. “According to Jarvis he was, but no, he’s not anymore. I haven’t been able to find out how, or why, so I didn’t want say anything to Steve and Clint about it yet.”

Gretel stood up abruptly, chair vanishing; Tony’s vanished at the same time, dumping him on his ass. She looked down at him with eyes that had gone completely black, and suddenly Tony was back on his feet. And scared, although strangely not of her; he realized in that moment that she’d meant what she said about not hurting him, because the angry power she was radiating so strongly was flowing around him, not touching him at all. “Nothing good ever comes of defying the natural order of life and death. That’s what causes the corruption in bad witches, and it’s what perverted the serum research from the beginning. The others should be fine: Steve was an experiment gone wrong for the right reason, Bruce was an accident caused by someone else’s greed, Bucky was a lab rat who survived. But the agent…” She shook her head, turning away from the horrified billionaire. “I have to go now, I have to warn Hansel. The agent won’t be…right anymore. And he may be able to sense a witch now.”

“Wait!” She turned back around, and Tony jumped a little when the power poked him. “No, I just…I have one more question, and I think it’s important, considering what you just said.” He swallowed, hoping she’d say his suspicions were wrong and knowing she wasn’t going to. Because them resurrecting Phil Coulson aside, if Bucky was alive and they were watching Steve so closely and they’d known where Bruce was all along before they’d finally sent the Black Widow after him…he had a feeling something was even more horribly wrong than he’d originally thought. “Gretel…who killed you?”

And she smiled, the magic brushing over him with an approving caress that made him shiver. “HYDRA…who later helped form SHIELD. Your father and the others didn’t know, but the evil has been there, submerged within the organization, from the very beginning.” She turned again and walked into nothingness, darkness falling around him. “Bucky has almost as much in common with you as he does with Steve, but he’s been driven insane, and he’s a killer. Be very, very careful when you start looking for him, Tony. Because they’re always watching and they’ll set him on you, and Steve doesn’t know yet – Hansel was waiting for the right time to tell him.”

 

Tony woke up with a start, back in his bed, Pepper sleeping peacefully beside him. He was drenched in cold sweat and he sat up, shivering. “Jarvis,” he whispered, “I need you to run a Level 12 self-diagnostic right now, authorization code…’oh shit, we’re in so much trouble’.”

The AI responded immediately, much to his relief. “Of course, sir. What reason for the self-diagnostic should I spread through the network?”

“Say someone tried to hack building security, you’re making sure they didn’t compromise any of the systems – call it a Level 4 scan.” Tony took a deep breath, forced himself to lay back down, staring up into the darkness. The results of the comprehensive but very delicate security breach Easter-egg hunt he was having Jarvis conduct wouldn’t be ready for hours. He didn’t think he’d be able to get back to sleep, not with the thoughts that were now running through his head, but getting up wouldn’t do him any good at this point either.

And that was when he felt a gentle nudge and sleep rolled back over him, a whisper inside his mind reassuring him that the powers at play weren’t going to make their move anytime soon – Clint had apparently confirmed that they weren’t anywhere near ready yet from what he had seen on his end, and he would make sure Steve knew what was going on as soon as he safely could. Tony accepted that, along with the passed-on recommendation for a particular dark-chocolate truffle Pepper would appreciate, and gave in to the pull of restful oblivion with a smile on his face. He could really get to like this magic stuff.


End file.
